British man 'caught accepting cocaine in police sting' faces 12 years in Bali jail

A British man faces 12 years behind bars after being accused of smuggling cocaine to the Indonesian tourist island of Bali.

An Argentine woman is also on trial alongside the British man. Their court case begun on Thursday, June 26 and if convicted, they could both face a substantial amount of time in prison.

Gracia and Shaw wore face masks as they sat next to each other in court. Neither they nor their lawyers spoke in court or to reporters covering the trial.

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Prosecutors say Eleonora Gracia, 46, was arrested in March at Bali’s airport with 244 grams (half a pound) of cocaine wrapped in a condom hidden in her vagina. Authorities alleged that she handed over the cocaine to Elliot James Shaw, 50, during a police sting operation at a hotel near a Bali beach.

Prosecutors at the District Court in Denpasar, Bali’s provincial capital, said they violated anti-narcotics laws. After the charges against Gracia and Shaw were read out in the Bali court, a panel of three judges adjourned the trial until July 3. The court is expected to deliver its verdict next month.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says Indonesia is a major drug-smuggling hub despite having some of the strictest drug laws in the world, in part because international drug syndicates target its young population.

Indonesian authorities on Monday arrested 285 people suspected of drug trafficking, including 29 women and seven foreigners, and seized over half a ton of narcotics during a two-month crackdown.

About 530 people are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, including 96 foreigners, the Ministry of Immigration and Corrections’ data showed last month. Indonesia’s last executions, of a citizen and three foreigners, were carried out in July 2016.

Shaw is the fourth Brit to come before a Bali court on cocaine trafficking charges in recent weeks. Phineas Ambrose Float, 31, stands accused of drug-smuggling, along with fellow Brits Lisa Ellen Stocker, 29, and her boyfriend Jonathan Christopher Collyer, 28.

The trio are on trial in the Bali capital Denpasar, and if found guilty, could be sentenced to execution by firing squad.

Float has been held in a Bali prison for the last four months, following his arrest in early February. His alleged accomplices, Stocker, from Gillingham in Kent, and Collyer were arrested together on Saturday, February 1. They had landed at Denpasar International Airport and were stopped at customs.

Their bags were searched and officials claimed to have found suspicious items in their suitcases disguised as food packages. Lab tests found that 10 sachets of Angel Delight powdered dessert mix in Collyer’s luggage, combined with seven similar sachets in Stocker's suitcase, contained 993.56 grams of cocaine - worth an estimated 6 billion rupiah - approximately £272,500.

They had travelled from the UK, with a stopover in Doha, Qatar. Prosecutor I Made Dipa Umbara told the District Court in Denpasar at a pre-trial hearing that Float was arrested two days later at a controlled delivery set up by police, in which the other two suspects handed over the stash of Class A drug to him in the car park of a hotel in Denpasar.

Ponco Indriyo, the Deputy Director of the Bali Police Narcotics Unit, alleged it was the third time the same trio have smuggled drugs into the country. Their first two occasions were successful, he claimed.